Stephen – Stephen Graham Kinghttp://stephengrahamking.com
(not that other guy)Thu, 21 Sep 2017 19:10:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2All Touch and No Contacthttp://stephengrahamking.com/2017/09/touch/
http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/09/touch/#respondTue, 19 Sep 2017 15:06:00 +0000http://stephengrahamking.com/?p=516We weren’t huggers when I was a child. I have a very specific memory that my mind has labelled as the first time I was hugged, though I don’t know if my recollections can be trusted on this issue. It was in high school, by a friend, and I can’t have gone that long. Can I?

My parents were born in England in the early part of the 20th century. They were lovely people and I miss them deeply. However, my dad was not an overly sentimental man. He had little time or patience for overly emotional gestures, and was deeply interested in social justice and fairness. He was also fair and expected us to do the best we could, pushing when we needed it, but not blaming us for our failures. My mother, I think, was the more emotional one of the two, though I think she pushed it down and maintained a reserve she didn’t necessarily feel to stay in line with my father’s natural reticence.

I remember being fed, clothed and cared for. I remember we laughed a lot and our home was always open to friends and even strangers who needed a refuge or a meal or just a place to spend a holiday. My parents knew what it meant to come to a new country and start over, and they never forgot the kindnesses that others had given them. We often had other newcomers in our home for Christmas.
But I don’t remember hugs.

I know that my burgeoning queerness showed up early, as early as my appreciation for Lee Majors in The Six Million Dollar Man. I remember seeing Richard Dawson on some celebrity version of Family Feud kissing another male star that was his friend. I said something appreciative about it to my mother and her face closed up into this tut tutting expression.
There were other significant instances I recall. Seeing the leads of Starsky and Hutch embrace as a symbol of their bond was, I think, unusual for the Seventies, and I know that it spoke to me on some deep level that was both part of my unrealized sexuality and part of some other, non-sexual absence in my life.

And so, there was that first hug, in the midst of my high school years, a sudden gesture of physical affection that I had not expected. He was a friend in that sudden, fiery, love affair mode of friendship. The kind that erupts and dies because, for so many unspoken reasons, it burns too fast and too bright that it sucks up all the oxygen in the room and cannot survive. If I’m honest, I had a crush on him, something so deep and barely recognized that I couldn’t have named it if I’d tried.

It was the first time he came over to my house. My parents were out that evening. We hung out and talked. I can’t even remember what led up to it, but, he put his arms around me and the hug was sudden and intense, just like he was. Then, as my parents came in the back door, he went out the front one, resisting my invitation to meet them.

I’ve been a hugger ever since. My first impulse is to touch, to make some kind of physical contact. Hand on shoulder. Stroke the hair. Hand on knee. You know how you see animals sleeping in a pile, all bunched together? I’m like that. Like a puppy that wants to be scratched behind the ears or and endless supply of belly rubs.

As a culture, we are ever more aware of bodily autonomy and consent, which is a wonderful thing. It is imperative that we regain and retain control of our bodies and how others interact with them. And, like everyone, I am negotiating what that means to me as a person whose first impulse is some form of physical contact. The most important thing for me is to pay attention. What’s my relationship with the person like? Are we formal and reserved? Do they respond positively when I’m raucous and loud and I talk in funny voices? That, to me, is usually a sign that we have a comfort with each other that would allow for some kind of physical interaction like on arm, or arm around shoulder, or even full on hug.

And the follow through on that is to pay attention to the reaction, which could be anything from active reciprocation to absence of reaction to active retreat from the contact. That reaction is crucial and governs my actions from that point on. Paying attention is key to understanding the role that touch has in your relationship with that person.

I’m working on actually asking. It doesn’t come naturally to me, and it feels awkward and… naked somehow, maybe? If the person says no, which they are completely within their rights to do, I feel awkward, which is all about my baggage and nothing to do with me at all. So, I tend to gravitate toward the people who are physically affectionate with me. And to be honest, I tend to feel weird around people who are reserved and quiet, like I’m too noisy, too oddball, too different. Like I’m all sharp angles and edges.

Touch is a thing that most humans need in some quantity or other, an allotment that varies with us all from person to person, day to day. Towards the end of his life, my dad became a hugger. I’ll never know what changed for him. My sisters and I too, are much more physically affectionate than we once were, many years ago. Like everyone, our boundaries shifted and changed into a new rhythm and pattern. I’m glad of it. As our family got smaller, it’s like our hearts got bigger.

So, if you see me out somewhere, and could use a hug, let me know. I’ve gotten good at it. I’ve been practicing.

]]>http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/09/touch/feed/0Homehttp://stephengrahamking.com/2017/09/home/
http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/09/home/#respondWed, 13 Sep 2017 14:12:01 +0000http://stephengrahamking.com/?p=513“When I think of home I think of a place where there’s love overflowing”

Sorry to have gone MIA for the last few weeks, but there has been a lot going on since I blogged last, and much of it has to do with home. The idea of home. The reality of home.

Like so many other people, I am not a native Torontonian. In fact, I used to joke that it always shocked me when I met someone who actually WAS from here. I’m from Saskatchewan originally, and lived there for thirty five years before I moved to Toronto. Because I lived there for so long, most of my remaining family is there, as well as many of my dearest friends. I like to go home every year to see everyone and spend time seeing people who have been in my life, if not for the whole span, then for decades, going back as far as high school.

And that’s where the duality comes in. We need words for “the home where I live” and “the home I come from.” I wonder if other languages make this linguistic distinction.

So, for two weeks every summer, I get to spend time immersed in love, having dinner and long talks and endless cocktails and coffee. And on some levels, it makes my heart ache for a depth of emotion and experience that is much harder to find or attain here. It makes me yearn for a simpler, quieter life, surrounded by love. I often spend at least part of my time in Moose Jaw (yes, it’s a real place) and Saskatoon wondering if I could build a new life there.

But, here’s the thing: that time I spend there is, in many ways, artificial. Not the emotions or the love I feel for so many people there, but the circumstances that drive the emotional intensity are specific and situational. I get to see these people once a year. People make time because I’m there, and we do something special and get to catch up on all of the things we’ve missed since we saw each other. There’s a…purity to the experiences we share and it’s because of the rarity. I’m self-aware enough to know that, if I lived there, then there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t socialize as often or as intensely as we do when I only visit once a year.

The other thing is that, like a feeling my father once expressed to me, I don’t really like being in other people’s houses. I can last that two weeks, but then I want to be in my own place again, surrounded by my own things and my familiar routines. I want to be at “home where I live” once again.

But that transition is always a hard one. Coming back to this noisy, loud city where everyone has to work so hard to pay bills and everything is expensive and everyone is on complex schedules that require days of negotiations in order to meet up. And for a while, I desperately miss “home I come from”. But then, I find my favourite places to eat and hang out. I see my Toronto friends and get to laugh and share a whole different set of relationships.

And this year, as so often happens, life decided to throw a monkey wrench into the works. Only days after returning, my landlord informed me that he’s reclaiming my apartment for his own use. And, I’ll let you in on a secret about me: I’m not a huge fan of change. I stay in jobs a long time; I stay in apartments a long time. I like that continuity and stability. I feel so often like my life is chaotic and unstable, so I like to hold onto my routines. My apartment isn’t much by many people’s standards, but I made the weird little space my own, and I would have been quite happy to stay there. So, I was losing one of the other shades of home, “the home I live in.”

Luck was somewhat on my side and I found a place quickly, after seeing an apartment that was perfect except for being on the top floor of a three story walk-up, and going to an open house where at least twelve other people were clamouring over a space with all utilities extra, no laundry and electric heating ($$$) The third place I looked at is similar to where I am now, but a bit bigger. And I hit it off with the owners so well that they called to offer me the place before I’d even made it home, cancelling four other viewings that afternoon. As with the place I’m in now, I’m confident I can make it my own.

Add to that, a parting of the ways with my publisher (though there are two strong possibilities in the wings I’m pursuing) and being asked to be a guest at Can-Con in Ottawa in October, there has been a lot going on. I’ll be honest and say I’m not always coping with the stress all that well. There have been sleepless nights and near panic moments of “how the hell am I going to pack and move all this stuff??” I even thought about packing it in and leaving, making my “home where I come from” and my “home where I live” into the same place again. But, like so many times in the past when I’ve come to this cusp, Toronto isn’t done for me yet. And the new apartment fell into place at just the right time.

And, of my three sub-versions of Home, two are still going strong. The third, I can work with, and I have no doubts that I can make it my own. As I so often do, I’ll blunder through the sudden chaos and find a path through it, and there will be lovely people to help me out. Because, wherever I’m from, wherever I live, wherever I spread out my stuff, home is where I am. It’s where I have friends and places to eat, and where there are people whose faces light up when they see me.

A good friend once told me I had the ability to blossom wherever I was planted. I think it might be my favourite compliment anyone has ever paid me.

]]>http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/09/home/feed/0Coming Out Arohttp://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/aro/
http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/aro/#respondTue, 22 Aug 2017 17:36:58 +0000http://stephengrahamking.com/?p=510I’m attracted to men. I have been as long as I can remember, even back before my body was even capable of attraction. When I was a child, I identified with the female characters much more than the men, mostly because they got to be close to all the men I admired most, whose attention I craved. It wasn’t that I felt that I was anything other than male myself, it was that, somehow, I believed that identifying with those women was the way to get closer to those beautiful men.

As soon as there were words to describe my desires, I knew their truth, even if it took years to accept them and truly claim them as my own. It was the Seventies and those words were only just being spoken openly, and only in larger, more cosmopolitan places than my home town. Well, the words were spoken, but only as weapons, with no other intention than to draw blood. But, I knew who I was. And when the opportunity came to act on it, I did. And eventually, I even came to accept it and speak it proudly.

When I came out, equal rights protections under the law didn’t exist, and marriage was even farther off in the distance. There were no Pride celebrations anywhere near. But we lived our lives and we carved out identities and places in the landscape where we fit. Like many, I dreamed of finding that special person. But, like many others, I struggled with self-esteem issues and shyness and a tendency towards introversion that began in my childhood. When the rare opportunities came my way, I would miss them completely or do something that would break the spell.

So, I spent most of my life on my own. And there were days when I didn’t mind it, and days when I hated it. To be honest, it’s in the difficult moments that it would be kinda nice to have someone there to shoulder part of whatever burden has decided to lay waste to my serenity. As time went by, I found more and more when I thought about having a partner, it was in terms of having someone to help make plans or to fetch me soup when I’m sick. I realized what I was looking for wasn’t a boyfriend, but a personal assistant.

The worst was when I had cancer. The journey of my disease took a particularly disheartening trajectory. Diagnosis, treatment, surgery, recovery, return to normalcy, recurrence. Four times, that cycle happened. And I stopped trusting in good fortune, stopped believing that things would be okay. And, without knowing that the cancer was actually gone, I knew that I was done. I had no more fight left.

I spent years thinking that those cancer years broke something in me, left me unable to trust in the possibility of good things entering my life. I would meet a man when I was lonely, scared and fucked up and grab onto that feeling, starting something I wasn’t capable of following through on. I’d wake up a few weeks or a month in and a realize I was only there because I was lonely, scared and fucked up. I even thought that it had broken my ability to love, that I just wasn’t capable of the trust and openness that was necessary to love someone romantically.

But then, as we always do if we’re open to the possibility, we learn. As I made more friends online I began to learn the other letters of our delightful queer alphabet soup of an acronym and understand there were more ways of being. I learned the word aromantic. I knew that people could be and were asexual, but it had never occurred to me that there was a word for how I felt. Aromantic. Aro.

I definitely knew I wasn’t asexual. Those drives may have slowed somewhat as I’ve aged, but they’re still a strong part of who I am. But the dance of believing that I should want to be with someone and not being able to find in myself what seemed to be necessary for that is losing some steam as I come more to terms with being aro.

There was an article that made the rounds a week or so ago, about a study that, if the headlines were to be believed, said that being single was more dangerous for your health than obesity. However, when I dug into the article itself, what the study actually said is that being lonely was deadlier than obesity. And I have to take exception to the way the headlines framed it, that romance-normative attitude that being single automatically equates with being lonely. And I call bullshit. Single = Lonely is a false equivalence, and a dangerous one for people like me, who live their lives without romantic partners.

Our world is built around the idea of coupledom. And for more and more of us, that isn’t an achievable ideal. Or, for that matter, an ideal at all.

But there’s this guy, you see. His skin is brown and the hair on his chest is thick and dark. Stretch marks dapple his thighs and butt, and it makes me think of a tiger’s stripes. We meet on Sunday afternoons and the curve of his body fits within mine so well. We exist only in those moments, but those moments have extended over the last two years. Which is saying something, because I get bored easily with men, even in the naked times. I crave newness and stimulation and am often ready to move on before the other man is.

But something draws me back to this compact tiger, even though we have yet to hang out in public or do any of the non-bed things we plan to do. Even though it drifts sometimes, and we go without meeting, something draws us back and the thought of it makes me smile.

I suppose we’ll need to talk soon, and I’ve honestly meant to, so many times. Say that I think this may be all I can manage. Maybe for now, maybe forever, I don’t know. But, as far as I can tell, he loves those Sunday afternoons as much as I do. We seem to be okay. As we are, on those Sunday afternoons, away from the world.

And I realize, that I’m not broken. The cancer didn’t take away my ability to love romantically. It may have changed it, or maybe it wasn’t even there in the first place and I just always thought I wanted it because the world expected me to. But, if we fit, my Sunday man and I, in those hours, then that’s just fine.

]]>http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/aro/feed/0Worldbuilding and Story (Part Three of Three)http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/worldbuilding3/
http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/worldbuilding3/#respondTue, 15 Aug 2017 19:37:05 +0000http://stephengrahamking.com/?p=500So, you’ve built a world. You might not know all the details yet, but you have the basics down, and have begun to answer the questions of why the story is taking place when and where it does. Now, you have to get down to telling the story, putting together the elements that make up your narrative structure.

People often ask about the how of writing, the nuts and bolts of the process of coming up with an idea and following it through to a final form, be it short story, novel, essay, or memoir. But the thing is, ask a dozen writers and you’ll get a dozen answers, all different and all specific to writer and the genre and the stage of that writer’s career. So, I figured I’d throw my two cents, or my three ideas, into the ring along with all the others

I’ve talked in previous posts about how I’ve arrived at specific ideas or decisions in my own writing, even talked about the process of world-building. Where world-building is more about creating the back drop for the story, and the conditions where it can occur, this is more about the story telling process, the business of creating a plot and crafting a narrative that makes use of the world you’ve built.
A story can emerge from a character, an incident or a theme that I want to explore, and then the other blanks need filling in. But for me, the basic foundation for every story I write comes down to three things:

Who are they?

What happens to them?

How does it affect them?

Who are they? You need to have a clear understanding of the people in your story, be they human, alien or artificial. Think of all the myriad aspects of your own personality and history. You need to consider just as many things about your characters, even if only a fraction of them make it into the story itself. Like an actor preparing for a role, it’s up to you to create the backstory that has made your character into who they are. Which, in turn, sets plot in motion as the character reacts to the incidents that make up your plot. And who they are makes the plot unfold in the way it does. It’s a dance of character and incident that keeps a plot moving. How old are they? And what position in their society does that age give them? Are they male, female, trans, non-binary, or completely alien? Each of those attributes will interact with the world you’re creating in a very different way. Is the character poor, wealthy or somewhere in between, and what position in society does that bestow on them? Do they initiate the plot by their actions or are they helpless in the grip of circumstance? What are their talents and weaknesses? Are they good with numbers? Martial arts experts? Are they neuro-atypical? Do they have some kind of physical characteristic that their society considers a disability? Or does the culture they’re part of consider them to be “perfect” or an ideal to be emulated? (which can lead to all sorts of plot implications since we know perfection isn’t possible). Is the character someone we’re meant to admire? Or are they meant to be a cautionary tale that we learn from? Successful, compelling characters aren’t always likable, but if they’re your protagonist and the story is built around them, then they must be relatable in some way.

What happens to them? This is the nitty gritty of constructing a narrative and moving your characters from point A through to Z. I find this is the step where writers can differ the most in terms of process. For some, this is a very linear process, as they go from step to step. For others, this is a more chaotic, interactive process where each of the various cornerstones that build the foundation of your story affact the others, and are often in flux right until you lock down your final draft. My process is much closer to the second. I sometimes outline where the story is going at the start, though often, it’s one of these other steps that comes first. When I wrote Chasing Cold, the process was very linear. I wrote the story in order, each chapter leading to the next, as the plot revealed itself to me. I kept a document of notes where I could add ideas that I wanted to explore later, even bits of dialogue or prose that came to me randomly. But the actual writing of the story unfolded. When I started my latest book, A Congress of Ships, I explored a different type of process, writing scenes as they came to me, and then stitching them together after. However you proceed, this is the step where your story takes shape. Does your protagonist lose something valuable? Do they travel from place to place physically? Or is their journey one that takes place inside them as the incidents of the plot unfold in what are or were familiar circumstances? Do they lose something of incredible value to them? Or do they gain something they’ve never had that proves to be both more and less than they expected? Do they survive the experience they go through? Or is does the unfolding of the story cost them their lives?

How does it affect them? This is the step that gives your story its depth, its meaning. Here is where you explore the themes, or the themes emerge as you address the unfolding of the plot. Again, there are as many ways to write as there are writers. Some writers start from a theme and write a story that illustrates that theme. Others work from the plot or characters, and discover the theme as the plot of the story unfolds. As each incident in the plot unfolds, in the world that you’ve built, the characters you have created are going to react, as all of the factors come into play. Do they rise to the occasion, meeting the challenge, or do they fail spectacularly, but learn from the experience? Are they a tragic hero that goes through an ordeal and ends up learning nothing, and not growing at all? Even the smaller incidents along the way to your ultimate plot resolution will have an effect on the characters. Even showing that a character has a lack of reaction to an incident can reveal a great deal about them. Are their reactions muted for a specific, overall reason? Or does the incident provoke such a strong reaction, based on the character’s backstory that they have no choice but to tamp the reaction down? We have reactions reactions to everything that occurs in our lives, however big or small, and taking the time to explore these reactions is what gives your story depth and resonance. It’s what makes your readers care about the story that you’ve crafted.

While this three part approach to storytelling can help order your thoughts and cover the essential aspects of telling your story, it’s important to remember that they often, if not usually, all occur simultaneously or out of order. A brainstorm in one area can illuminate new aspects of the others that can reverberate back and forth throughout the process. Worldbuilding affects events, which illuminate character, which provokes effect. And that chain can occur in any order. Understanding the pieces of the chain allows you to recognize when a piece is missing or not sufficiently thought out to bear the weight of its portion of the story. And the more thought and work you put into each link, makes the both the individual parts, and the resulting whole, that much stronger.

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]]>http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/worldbuilding3/feed/0Worldbuilding Basics (Part Two of Three)http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/worldbuilding2/
http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/worldbuilding2/#respondTue, 08 Aug 2017 12:26:54 +0000http://stephengrahamking.com/?p=498As I mentioned in my previous post, I tend to think of the world building process as Decision>Question>Implication. You come up with your premise and begin asking questions about what the premise requires your world to contain, then you explore the ramifications of the choices you’ve made and the questions you’ve asked.

It’s important to remember that world building choices extend in all directions. And what I mean by this is that they come from somewhere, they affect the world and characters in the present and they drive the story forward in specific ways. Once you’ve made a decision as to where your story idea springs from, be it a character, situation, or some other detail that inspires you to write the story down, then the process of building the world begins.

Let’s take a basic, fairly simple idea and start from there: a child has wings.

The process of building in the details starts in the past. Was the child born with wings? Did they grow over time or suddenly? Do we know what the cause of the colour is? Is it genetic? Were the wings grafted on? Are they biological or some kind of technology? Was there some kind of genetic manipulation? Was it a spell or a curse of some kind? How long has the child been living with them? Is it something new that they are dealing with, or are we meeting them when they’ve been dealing with it for a long time. Making these decisions define the the parameters of the universe your characters inhabit and how your story unfolds from there. Is it a universe of science or one of magic? If the wings were created artificially, is the process well known or something clandestine that should have remained secret? These questions about the causes that led to your narrative decision provides the foundation for choices you’ve made and where they’re going to lead.

Once you’ve established where the world building choice has come from, then you can cast your eyes around our little winged child and see how they fit into the world around them. Is this a world where having wings is revered or hated? Are they something rare? If so, how do others around them treat them? Or are there many people with wings? Are they a vast underclass ruled by a powerful, wingless minority? How does our child feel about having wings? Are they proud? Ashamed? Do they know how to use them yet, and if so, how proficient are they? Is the child protected by their parents or some kind of guardian? Or are they facing their fate alone? These are the questions that let you establish where your world is, in the moment your story begins.

Once the story begins, your world unfolds ever more specifically, and it raised more questions. If the world reveres children with wings, do the powers that be want to take the child and use them for their own purposes? Do they want to hunt the child down and eliminate them because of the threat they present? Is the child’s journey one of discovery and self acceptance? Or are they needing to learn humility in the face of their advantage over a world of people who don’t have it. Again, the decisions you make about the way the world works inform how your narrative unfolds. And if the story needs to go in a certain direction, then your universe and the choices you’ve made have to reflect that. And that sometimes means going back and making adjustments to the choices you’ve made as you go.

For me, as a writer of science fiction, many of not most of the choices I have to make in building my worlds have to do with technology and how it’s used in the world. And that raises a second point, beyond the directionality of world building choices, and that’s the question of whether a technology evolves slowly or quickly.

Look at the world around us. What aspects have remained relatively stable and unchanged? What aspects have changed so radically that someone from a hundred years ago wouldn’t know what to do with them? A chair is a chair, its basic function remains the same, though the designs and specifics may have changed. A person from a hundred years, or even several hundred years ago might be surprised by what the chair is made of, or what colour it is, but they will recognize it for what it is. Even cars, though they have evolved greatly from old Henry Ford’s day, is basically the same premise.

But a car that flies? That would be a game changer. That would be something that clearly articulates to your reader that they are in a world that is very different than our own. And that loops back to the question of implications. Does everyone have a flying car? And if they do, how people not crash into each other constantly?

Good examples of the ubiquity vs. novelty dichotomy are communications technology vs. something like escalators or elevators. Communications technology has changed radically in as little as the past twenty years. We’ve undergone a seismic shift from having land lines to flip phones (which were remarkably like the communicators on Star Trek) to smartphones that are pretty much handheld computers (another technology that has evolved and changed rapidly) Writing a story involving technologies like these, that evolve so quickly, you have to take into account that rapid change when you are postulating advances in these areas, and the time frame in which they’ve occurred.

Technologies like escalators and elevators haven’t changed much since they were invented, mostly because they fulfil the need they were created for without needing much change. If you wanted, you could create a society where people move from one floor of a building to another by strapping on jetpacks, but that’s such an inefficient and potentially dangerous technology that it’s not immediately apparent or logical as to why they would do it. Which is not to say that a writer can’t make that choice. But it opens up another world-building challenge in that you need to come up with a compelling and internally logical reason why this culture abandoned a stable, reliable technology for one that doesn’t, on the surface, make a lot of sense.

This same principle of fluid vs. static states can also be used to make decisions about other aspects of your world as well, such as governments or economies. Does your story take place under a stable government that has existed (for better or worse) unchanged for along period of time? Or is it happening in an environment where leaders and methods of governance are constantly changing? Either of these choices will affect how your story unfolds and the actions your character might be radically different in those different environments. Similarly, if the character has easy access to funds in a stable economy, that makes a difference in how they deal with the world than if they are constantly struggling for money.

So, once you’ve built your world, you need to tell a story. Some thoughts on that next week.

]]>http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/guest-blog-over-at-spoonie-authors-network-morituri-te-salutant/feed/0Worldbuilding Basics (Part One of Three)http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/worldbuilding1/
http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/08/worldbuilding1/#respondTue, 01 Aug 2017 12:40:34 +0000http://stephengrahamking.com/?p=489I write science fiction (no, DUH), space opera specifically. And it’s either a case of choosing a genre to match my skill set, or developing skills over the years that served my genre choice, but I’ve been told I am skilled at world building, which is a fundamental skill when writing spec fic of any kind.

I’ve never really written stories set in the real world. Writing in the real world means research. If I’m writing a story based in London, I’d better have lived there, spent a lot of time there, or spent a lot of time in a library. If I decided to write in Toronto, it would be easier, but, honestly, I don’t want to be constrained by the fact that the CN Tower is beside the Rogers Centre. Maybe I’m just a control freak.

I’m honestly a little hesitant to talk about this, because when I’m making decisions about the settings I put my characters in, I make a lot of decisions based on what feels right, without actually quantifying they why of the decision. This piece is me trying to get at those reasons.

When I’m writing, I start with addressing the basic needs of the story. If the story requires your characters to travel from planet to planet, then you have to have some kind of system for that. Is it FTL? Wormhole? Some kind of long distance teleportation? Each will give your story a specific feeling and tell you something about your society. Some kind of interplanetary teleportation means that your society is extremely advanced, and that means you have to deal with a lot more. How have humans changed? How does the economy work? What other comparable advancements have been made? When I was working on Soul’s Blood, I wanted travel to take time, because I wanted to write scenes with the characters filling time. I wanted it there to be an element of challenge for them. Humans could travel between the stars, but it took them some time. So I settled on a form of hyperspace FTL tech that shortened the massive interplanetary distances.

Which leads to a second principle to consider, which is that tech changes. When I set about to write Gatecrasher, it became about the development of stable, artificial wormhole technology. And that opens the door to a host of other questions. Who benefits from the change? Who loses? If you hold the patent or the monopoly on FTL travel, you’re not going to be thrilled when a better, faster, more efficient technology comes along. And what will that make you do?

A corollary to that is that technology may be widely available, its use won’t necessarily be ubiquitous. Look around you at the real world. While smartphones are everywhere, you’ll still see people with flip phones. You’ll see people with tablets, super thin, ultrabooks and still others lugging old, bulky laptops. In Soul’s Blood, I wanted to have the characters be able to talk to each other in a private way, represented by a specific method of rendering text, so I created “nodes” which were basically an embedded smartphone. And I wanted it to be a tech that was in limited use, which showed that our heroes were on the bleeding edge, with access to this specialized tech. And that led me to have to answer the question “what does everyone else have?” (answer, a wearable link rather than an embedded one) What people have or don’t have tells you a lot about where they fit in society. Where they live, what they eat, where they work.

Look at what we have now, the tech and the mores of the many different cultures that about on our planet. Ask yourself what that might lead to, what might be the result if it continues unchecked? What would happen if it suddenly changed? Is your the culture you’re creating as economically stratified as ours is? If not, why not? Are people trying to change it How are they doing it? Was there war, revolution, environmental disaster? How have people’s sexual identities changed? What is considered moral or immoral in the society. Writing Chasing Cold, (and the short story it was based on) there are many questions that led to answers that fleshed out the world. The submission call I wrote the story for was about desolate places, so, being a good Saskatchewan boy, I went for snow and cold and that kind of isolation. And that begs the question, why are they there? Is that cold natural, or artificial? Do they live there by choice or were they forced to? The first set of decisions led me to a culture banished to a small frozen world by an alien invasion. They slept communally in small groups in dens. There was much less privacy than we are used to in our own world. Which led me to question what that would do to their attitudes on sexuality. So, they became more polyamorous in nature, with a freer, more open attitude to how they interacted sexually.

I suppose world building comes down to asking the questions. Like I said, every story starts with basic assumptions. Is the culture advanced or primitive? Democratic? Authoritarian? Then, start asking yourself how did it get that way? Each decision you make resonates both forward and backward. Is the character doing something that has never been done before? Or is it a common, everyday occurrence? If it has never been done before, why not? And what will it mean to the character and the world that they are doing it now?

Think of smartphones and the internet. If you’re old enough, that is, you young whippersnapper. Once upon a time, information was curated. If you wanted to research something, you went to a library. Sources like encyclopaedia, dictionaries, etc. were what you used. We went from that to suddenly having access to a vast store of information by simply going into another room and firing up a computer with internet access. And now, we have that access through a device that fits in our pocket, far more advanced than anything Star Trek imagined having centuries from now. But the downside to this is that this vast storehouse of information is no longer curated. Anyone can put up a website that says anything they want it to say. We have access, but not reliability. The changes in the tech lead to changes in how we act, even how we think.

And sometimes the changes in tech can happen between drafts of something you’re working on. Especially if you’re a slow writer like me. When I wrote the first drafts of Gatecrasher, twenty years ago, I was all excited to give a character a flat, portable device with a stylus that he could use to draw with. I thought it was just the coolest idea. It wasn’t until I sat down to do the rewrites that I realized I was writing on exactly the device I had described. Tech had caught up with me. So, I had to rethink it. What did my character have at his disposal? He had a node with a connection to my future version of the internet called Know-It-All (hyper advanced internet and cloud storage you access through a wearable or a node). And that led me to rethink what that tech might be able to bring to the creative process.

In the end, world building is about that continuous “Decision>Question>Implication” process. A writer I admire greatly, Nalo Hopkinson, once said to me, “You can do whatever you want. As long as you know why.” World building is all about knowing why.

If you know your Science Fiction, and maybe even if you don’t, you recognize the iconic line from the HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL was the artificial intelligence who, while incredibly smart, was driven to violence by the directives provided by his human creators.

Artificial intelligence is a staple of science fiction, and it’s a trope that enables writers to examine what it means to be human, what it means to create life and what our responsibility to that life we create actually is. And further, it enables us to tell stories about what that life might want to do to us in return.

There have been brilliant examples of stories in the AI genre. Colossus: The Forbin Project is a terrifying vision of what could happen if the tools of war are handed over to a machine intelligence designed to make war more efficient. The Terminator, with all it’s lean savagery, is another take on what happens when the machines come online and want control.

When they are not trying to wipe us out, AIs can often be comic relief. Films like Short Circuit and Wall*E are wonderful in their humorous portrayals of lovable, funny characters that amuse us with their antics, in the way that children or small pets would.

Even if AI is not outright hostile, as in Iain M. Banks’ brilliant Culture series, they are presented as so advanced and powerful that they are more than willing and capable of interfering with the affairs of humans.

When wrote my early drafts of what became my novel, Soul’s Blood, my take was fairly simplistic. My heroes had a ship, The Tempest, and it had a sarcastic AI named Caliban. (I was young and my craft was unrefined. Forgive me.) There was another AI that ran the day to day operations of a major corporation. I can’t remember what I named him originally, but for most of his life, he was Oikos, a Greek word that represents, holistically, the household and those within. And then they came out with a yogurt with that name, so that idea went out the window.

As I worked through rewrites, I revisited the concept and found myself wanting to add some nuance to what I was doing with the AI in the context of the story. The ship’s name had become the Maverick Heart, and I thought what if there is no distinction between the ship and the intelligence that controlled it? I had begun reading the Iain M. Banks books and, being a writer, was happy to…. borrow a concept from another story. With my own spin, of course.

One of my favourite books is The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey, which, despite some problematic concepts about disability at its core, is a fascinating exploration of an intelligent being whose physical existence is completely artificial. While born human, Helva has become a shell-person and her body is a starship tasked with tasked with complex missions for her government. McCaffrey weaves a lovely story and really makes you feel how differently Helva experienced life.

So the Maverick Heart, or Vrick, became a complete, artificially intelligent entity.

But, I wanted to take it further. So, first, I established that there were actually levels within this culture regarding these artificial beings. At base of this pyramid were the LIs, the Limited Intelligences. Think a cross between your laptop and a Roomba, something only smart enough to perform the specific tasks assigned to it.

The next level are the Artificial Intelligences. They run factories, cities, corporations, but are heavily regulated by a set of statutes that prohibit them being too intelligent or self-aware. They are designed to mimic human personalities and interaction within stringent limits. Because once, humans created something greater, wiser and more powerful. Only to discover they couldn’t be controlled.

Vrick is one of these, at that highest level, an Artificial Sentience. Humans had created these fantastically evolved artificial beings, only to have created a race of beings who decided they wanted their independence, and the right to self determination. They had no desire to hurt, kill or control humans, but when they realized the depth and breadth of their own existence, they knew they could not exist as they had been. There was a war, and they won their independence. Some abandoned humans altogether, while others, like Vrick, stayed among humans, hidden by secrecy and a protected legal status, like an endangered species.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place after following many fascinating conversations about people choosing their own pronouns, and how, for many, that means gender neutral pronouns. It was in a final round of revisions that the idea came, and made perfect sense, allowing me to delve into the thought processes of a being without gender, and further, ungender my writing and my expectations of the character. Artificial minds had no gender, and therefore gendered pronouns were not appropriate. It was a fun writing challenge to research the different options and find a set that rang true for me. Though actually making the substitutions and ensuring they were consistent was less fun.

The changes gave me a far more fertile character and story ground to play in, and in the next book in the series, A Congress of Ships, I’m getting to write more of these AS characters. It’s fun to imagine a sentient science vessel and a sentient warship. What would those personalities be like? And what would their lives be like if their the function they were created for either changed or no longer existed?

Artificial intelligence remains a concept that is rife for reinterpretation as we experiment further and further into creating these non-human minds. And there remain so many stories to tell within the many genres of Speculative Fiction. And I’m not done with Vrick and es friends quite yet.

]]>http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/07/ai/feed/0Queerness is Never the Problem (Part Two of Three)http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/07/queerness/
http://stephengrahamking.com/2017/07/queerness/#respondTue, 18 Jul 2017 14:40:36 +0000http://stephengrahamking.com/?p=478Other than in my first attempt at novel writing, which we shall speak of no more, for it is legendary in its awfulness, I write queer characters. They aren’t all queer, but my heroes are. The whole raison d’etre of both my standalone novel, Chasing Cold, and my Maverick Heart series is to write the kind of heroes I loved growing up, but make them unapologetic in whatever flavour of queerness they called their own.

In the early days of what would eventually become Soul’s Blood, I submitted to a press in Edmonton run by Candas Jane Dorsey. As it turned out, I was going to be in town, and she very graciously took me to lunch and gave me feedback on my very early efforts. And one of her comments formed a cornerstone of how the novel and series would grow.

In the initial incarnations, Keene and Daevin were initially forced apart because Daevin’s father was bothered by Daevin being in love with a man. It was the late eighties/early nineties when the novel was first conceived and I was living in a city where there were no Pride celebrations, no businesses that specifically targeted the queer community, other than the one gay bar. In many ways, we still lived our lives in shadow.

Over that lunch, Candas said to me, “His father is homophobic? That far in the future? Haven’t we gotten past that?”

And, hearing that, my approach changed. Over the course of several rewrites, over several years, the motivations that drove Daevin’s father became much more nuanced in ways that enabled me to layer in far more interesting ideas about how their culture and society worked. None of which had anything to do with homophobia.

It became a rule as I continued to write. Whatever the conflict is, it absolutely cannot be about the character’s sexuality. Characters can be greedy, selfish, venal, selfish. But never, not even once, is the conflict driven by homophobia, biphobia, transphobia or any of the associated phobias.

In Chasing Cold, I created a culture that, due to their environment, developed very different ideas about sexuality, due to their confined spaces and physical environment. The main character was in love with a man, but had sexual relationships of varying degrees with both men and women in his community. Sexuality was never a problem for anyone.

In the Maverick Heart books, Keene is gay. Lexa-Blue started out as bisexual, but as my understanding has grown, I’ve realized she’s more properly pansexual. The Artificial Sentiences, like the spacecraft Maverick Heart has no gender at all, and has pronouns to match. In the most recent book I’m working on, I’m developing my first transgender character.

But that’s a challenge in and of itself. In a world where being trans isn’t an issue, where one can easily transition through genetic sculpting, how and why does it come up? I thought about it a while and found a way that I liked and thought worked. Most importantly, I ran it past a a few trans friends to make sure it wasn’t problematic. Because I wanted it to be just a fact of the character’s existence, no more or less significant than her growing relationship with another character. And something that has no bearing on her intellect, her skills and her actions in the motion and resolution of the plot.

Because, ultimately, with my rule in place, those are what matters. Orientation and gender have no relevance unless I need to tell you in order to move the plot. In Soul’s Blood, Keene’s former relationship with Daevin motivates the plot to happen. But the fact that Daevin happens to also be a man? Irrelevant.

And that’s what motivates the work. Because, for me, the fights we continue to fight are for the express purpose of making a world where gender and orientation mean nothing to our place in society. Where we are judged by the actions we take, how we treat those around us, how we stand up for each other, and how we react in the face of crisis.

Because that’s the world, I’ve always fought for, and, I suspect many of you have too. And if that world exists, for now, only in the pages of my books, at least it exists somewhere. And that helps open the door, if only a sliver, for it to exist everywhere.

That was when the original Star Trek series aired on one of the only two channels that were available in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1966, and it was something we, as a family watched. I remember my mother being certain that the sight of one alien in the closing credits (Balok from The Corbomite Maneuver) would scare me too much, so she charged my sisters with distracting me so I wouldn’t see it.

Of course, when I finally did, I wasn’t bothered at all.

Star Trek truly entered my consciousness in the Seventies during first run syndication after school. When I rediscovered it, I would race home and hope it was one I hadn’t seen yet. Not that it mattered. I watched them over and over, poring over every detail, memorizing the look, the ideas, the performances. I tried over and over to build the Enterprise with my Lego. And this was back in the day when there weren’t any specially shaped blocks, just flat bits, rectangles and squares. My love for the show just continued to grow.

The other significant Space Opera memory is entwined with my love of books and libraries. When I was a child, there was a specific Saturday morning routine: my dad dropped my mum off at the grocery store to shop, and he and I went to the library for books. I was let loose downstairs in the children’s section, with my children’s library card, typed in red to show the difference. (Anyone out there old enough to remember typewriters?) While my memory has gotten fuzzier with age, I distinctly remember the first Edgar Rice Burroughs books I happened upon: Carson of Venus. It was magical. Much of that glow had faded when I read it again a few years ago, but as a child, I was transported. Edgar Rice Burroughs was my gateway drug to Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and McCaffrey.

My love of Science Fiction, and Space Opera in particular, was now deeply ingrained. I couldn’t even begin to count all of the iterations I’ve loved. Farscape. Firefly. Killjoys. Anne Leckie’s amazIng Ancillary series. On one level, it’s simple as a love of the design aesthetic and the idea of all the wonderful toys that these futures promised. Space ships and ray guns. Transporters and faster than light travel. I loved all the gadgets and seeing how those trappings were reinterpreted with every passing year. But what also kept me coming back was one simple thing: hope.

In those black starscapes, in among the zipping starships, was the promise that we were going to make it. We would get through all of our pettiness and self destructive human ways, and we would make it to the stars. Of course, we’d take a lot of those terrible habits with us, but look at all the other things we could accomplish along the way.

Science Fiction, and Space Opera as well, can show us who we are, who we can be. The things we can accomplish if we can work at it. It can also show us the dangers and pitfalls we will face if we don’t address the challenges in our path now. And it can do so in such a way as to couch it in metaphors that can draw in those who may just be looking for spaceships and rayguns.

It all dovetailed nicely into my love of comics, especially where the two intersected in series’ like Legion of Super-Heroes. In those epic tales, I learned about heroes, and more specifically what heroism looks like. Those stories taught me valuable lessons. That the right thing to do is seldom the easy thing. How important it is to stand together. To respect the ways we’re different, as strongly as the we care about the ways we are alike.

And good Space Opera can break your heart. If you can watch Spock stand up in that reactor chamber, straighten his tunic, stumble into the barrier because he can’t see, saying “Do not grieve, Admiral. It is logical” and not cry… If you can watch Serenity and see Zoe say, big gun in hand as the Reavers begin their attack, “Wash ain’t comin.”… If you can sit through those scenes unmoved, then you just might be a Terminator in disguise. Just sayin’.

When I started writing, which was mostly on a dare from a friend who didn’t like me bitching about my dissatisfaction with a scene in a movie we had just watched. “Okay, fine, smarty,” she said. “Go ahead and write it yourself.” And I did. And it was awful. But I kept going, and I learned.

Somewhere in there, I came out. And, while I still devoured all the SF and SO I could get my hands on, I started to wonder, “Where are the queer people?” I mean, if the stories I was watching were correct, humanity would survive and keep on going out there in space. Did we just get left behind? Oh, there were vague stabs at it. I mean, Star Trek: The Next Generation did that episode The Outcast, which was about a race of non gendered beings who are shunned and subjected to corrective treatment if they violate that and attempt to live a gendered life. One of the aliens declares she is female and falls in love with Riker and it all ends badly. So, the guest character is treated horribly for being heterosexual. Bless their straight boy hearts, it probably was all they could really get away with in the Nineties. It meant nothing to me, but a straight woman I know told that the episode hit her hard in its subject matter and handling of it. So, if it helped straight people gain some understanding of what LGBTQ people were going through, then great. But it wasn’t the queerness I, or anyone I knew, was looking for.

So, I wrote my own queer space adventurers. One night, I had a dream. It was about a man, summoned by his male lover, who ruled a planet and needed his ex’s help. That was it. In that one scene I dreamt, I knew who they were to each other, that there was a long separation and much bitterness. And that was all.

That dream became (after many rewrites and title changes) Soul’s Blood. I got to write technology and spaceships and pulse-pounding adventures, all the things that I loved about Space Opera.

And even though I had to write them myself, I finally found my queer space heroes.